Electronic exchanges, including online auctions and guaranteed deliveries, have proliferated along with the Internet. These electronic exchanges aim to provide a high degree of trading efficiency by bringing together a large number of buyers and sellers. Such exchanges are focused on directly matching the bids and offers of buyers and sellers. Conventional transactions on the exchange are between (i) buyers and sellers, (ii) intermediaries (e.g., brokers, which may be a buyer or seller), or (iii) buyers or sellers and intermediaries.
The proliferation of Internet activity has also generated tremendous growth for advertising on the Internet. Typically, advertisers (i.e., buyers of ad space) and online publishers (sellers of ad space) have agreements with one or more advertising networks (ad networks), which provide for serving an advertiser's banner or ad across multiple publishers, and concomitantly provide for each publisher having access to a large number of advertisers. Ad networks (which may also manage payment and reporting) may also attempt to target certain Internet consumers (i.e., users) with particular advertisements to increase the likelihood that the consumer will take an action with respect to the ad. From an advertiser's perspective, effective targeting is important for achieving a high return on investment (ROI).
Online advertising markets exhibit undesirable inefficiencies when buyers and sellers are unable to transact. For instance, although a publisher may be subscribed to many ad networks, and one or more of those ad networks may transact inventory with other ad networks, only one of the ad networks to which the publisher is subscribed will be involved in selling (e.g., auctioning or guaranteeing delivery) a given ad space for the publisher. The publisher, or a gatekeeper used by the publisher, selects or prioritizes which ad network (or advertiser having a direct agreement with the publisher) will serve the impression for a given ad request.
Further, in online advertising, advertisers may wish to target broad consumer segments (e.g., California consumers) or specific consumer segments (e.g., males of ages 20-34 in California browsing finance pages). Advertisers need the ability to specify succinctly their values for and exposure (i.e., number of ad views) to various consumer segments, from broad to narrow.
Advertisers spend long hours specifying an ad campaign which, most of the time, ends up not being portable. Once an ad campaign is written down into a contract, a company such as Yahoo!® invests long hours translating the ad campaign into scripts which are used to access the inventory and allocate ads.
Driven by the shift from broadcast to interactive media, almost every aspect of advertising is being automated, including its sale, delivery, and measurement. Moving away from the real estate metaphor of buying space, advertisers may now buy very specific contextual events like “male user visits sports page on the weekend”, or more generally bundles of contextual events. As a result, advertisers need more flexible and expressive ways to describe their ad campaign goals.
Within this document, one of ordinary skill recognizes certain abbreviations such as, for example, CPI (cost per impression), CPM (cost per 1000 impressions), CPC (cost per click), CPA (cost per acquisition), eCPM (effective CPM).